Your PC boots, tries Automatic Repair, fails, restarts, and tries again - forever. On screen sits one file name: SrtTrail.txt. This guide explains what that file actually is, why the loop happens, which quick repairs are worth exactly one attempt, and the route the video uses to end it for good: restoring a healthy clone image with Macrium Reflect.
First, the fact that saves you hours: SrtTrail.txt is not the fault. It is the log file that Startup Repair writes while it works. The screen that names it is really saying: repair tried, repair failed, and the details are recorded in this log. Deleting SrtTrail.txt deletes the report, not the problem - Windows simply writes a fresh log on the next failed attempt. The laptop in the video proves the point: command after command was tried on it, and the loop continued, because the underlying boot damage was bigger than any single command. The recovery that worked was different - boot from a rescue USB, open Macrium Reflect, and restore a ready-made clone image of a healthy identical laptop. This page walks the whole route in the right order: read the log, try the small fixes once, then restore.
Every restart runs the same play: Windows starts to boot, detects it failed last time, launches Startup Repair, Startup Repair runs its tests, cannot fix the cause, and restarts into the same failure. A loop like this means the damage is in something Windows needs before the desktop exists - a boot-critical driver file, the registry, the boot configuration, or the disk itself. That is also why tricks that work inside Windows are useless here: you never reach Windows. Everything in this guide happens in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) or from a bootable rescue USB, which is exactly where the video works from.
SrtTrail.txt is evidence, and it takes two minutes to read. From the failure screen choose Advanced options, then Troubleshoot, Advanced options, Command Prompt. Open the log with notepad C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt - if the path is not found, your Windows partition has a different letter in WinRE (often D:); find it with diskpart then list vol. Scroll to the end of the log. You are looking for the section that begins Root cause found. Sometimes it names an exact file, like a corrupt boot-critical driver. Sometimes it honestly says Startup Repair cannot determine the cause. Both answers are useful: a named file means a small repair may work; no named cause after several attempts means stop repairing and start restoring. There is a full case page in this guide on reading the log line by line.
If the log names a small, specific fault, one round of WinRE repairs is fair. Run chkdsk C: /f to fix file-system errors. Run the offline system file check with sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\Windows to restore corrupt system files. If the loop began right after an update, use Uninstall Updates in Advanced options - remove the latest quality update first. If a restore point exists, System Restore is the gentlest option of all. But grade these honestly: they fix small damage. When the same loop survives a full round of them - as it did on the laptop in the video, where the commands changed nothing - more commands will not save you. The machine is telling you the damage is structural, and structural damage is what images are for.
Here is the route that recovered the laptop in the video, and why it is so fast: the image already existed. For a set of identical office laptops, a clone image of one healthy machine is kept ready on a 1 TB tools USB. The recovery is then mechanical. Plug in the USB, open the laptop's boot menu, and boot from the USB. Start Macrium Reflect from the rescue environment. Choose to restore or browse for an image, select the stored clone image, select the laptop's internal disk as the destination, and start the restore. Macrium writes the healthy Windows - partitions, boot files, registry, drivers, everything - back onto the disk in one operation. On the next restart the laptop boots straight into the restored Windows. No format, no reinstall, no hours of updates and software setup, because the image already contains a finished, working system. The case pages of this guide cover each part of this route in depth: making such an image, restoring to the same disk or a new one, and what to do when no image exists.
This route has two honest conditions, and hiding them would make this guide useless. First, the image must exist before the crash. A clone restore cannot be improvised after the loop starts; it is a preparation, not a repair. If you have no image, the data-rescue case page in this guide is your route instead. Second, the image should come from the same model of machine. The video restores an image taken from an identical laptop, which is why it boots cleanly on the first try. An image from a different model can leave you with missing storage or chipset drivers and a fresh boot problem. Restoring to different hardware sometimes works with extra driver steps, but the identical-machine image is the reliable version of this trick - and for offices running a fleet of the same laptop, it is the version worth building.
The complete recovery, shown live on a real crashed laptop - boot the rescue USB, open Macrium Reflect, browse the clone image and restore it, step-by-step.
Watch Full VideoSrtTrail.txt is the log file written by Startup Repair. It lives at C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt and records every test repair ran and, when it can find one, the root cause of the boot failure. The repair screen names it because the log holds the details of why repair failed. The file itself is not damaged and is not the cause - it is the report.
No. Deleting the log does not touch the fault that makes Windows fail to boot, and Startup Repair simply writes a new SrtTrail.txt on the next attempt. The loop ends only when the real cause is repaired - a corrupt file restored, a bad update removed, a dying disk replaced - or when a healthy system image is restored over the damage, as this guide shows.
Yes, but the route is longer. First rescue your files: from the WinRE Command Prompt you can copy documents to a USB drive, or remove the disk and read it from another PC. Then repair or clean-install Windows on the healthy disk. Afterwards, do what this guide's closing case page describes - make a full system image while the PC is healthy, so the next crash is a restore, not a rebuild.